Specifics

First edition, first printing. Signed (in English and in kanji) in black marker on the first page by Moriyama. Soft cover. Printed stiff wrappers, with illustrated dust jacket. Photographs by Daido Moriyama, with additional text (in Japanese) and an interview with the artist by Takuma Nakahira. 312 pp., with 272 pages of black-and-white full-bleed reproductions, printed in rich gravure. 9 x 7-1/4 inches. [Cited in Andrew Roth, ed., The Book of 101 Books: Seminal Photographic Books of the Twentieth Century. (New York: PPP Editions in association with Roth Horowitz LLC, 2001), in Andrew Roth, ed., The Open Book. (Göteborg, Sweden: Hasselblad Center in association with Steidl Verlag, Göttingen, Germany, 2004), and in Martin Parr and Gerry Badger, The Photobook: A History, Volume I. (London and New York: Phaidon, 2004).] Scarce.

Condition

Fine in Near Fine dust jacket (minimal shelf wear, as is typical with this title, else Fine).

Description

One of the most extraordinary and influential books in the history of photography. Moriyama's very best and highly sought-after third book. Bye, Bye Photography, Dear is a masterpiece book-work, which pushes every image-making 'boundary' to its extreme edge, reflecting both the politically charged times of Japan in the 1960s and 1970s and Moriyama's unique sensitivity to the seemingly mundane and chaotic subject matter. Raw, gritty, nasty images present a broken picture of a time and strangely draw the viewer in powerful ways. This contradiction inherent to the work is mesmerizing. An 'overexposed' gritty, scratched image is a semi-abstract close-up of a face; A nearly unrecognizable, partly out-of-focus and scratched image is a view of a seascape. An extraordinary book in every way. Extremely scarce in this condition.

From Daido Moriyama (2001, translated by Linda Hoaglund, from "The Book of 101 Books," Andrew Roth (ed.)): "Of my many books of photographs, Bye, Bye Photography, Dear is closest to my heart. Even now, when I flip through the pages, some thirty years after making it, the book instantly brings back vivid memories of the sixties... Could one give meaning to the meaningless act of printing a simple black and white of a frame that by accident recorded nothing? Perhaps the authority of the failed negative, with all its inherent possibility, could be restored. I imagined I could construct a book -- a book of pure sensation without meaning -- by shuffling into a harmonious whole a series of childish images..."